April 2013

We praise thee auspicious Cicada, enthroned like
a king
On the tree’s summit, thou cheer’st us with exquisite
song…
Free from suffering, though hast neither blood nor
flesh –
What is there prevents thee from being a
god?

Written in the first century BC, these lines by the
Greek poet Anacreon are the earliest recorded example of insect
praise. Attributing god-like status to his singing friend, Anacreon
recognises its difference from other life on Earth. In a later age
he may have asked “what prevents thee from being a machine?”

When Sublime
Frequencies released Tucker Martine’s album of insect field
recordings, Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica From
Southeast Asia in 2004, many listeners refused to believe that
the glitchy, buzzing tones on the CD hadn’t originated in a laptop
or a synthesiser. Conversely, anyone listening to David Tudor’s
Rainforest for the first time might easily be persuaded
that they were hearing actual field recordings from the Amazon
jungle.

“Some hear bug music, some hear people music, all
depends on your ears” wrote the 19th century Japanese poet Wâfu.
This epigram opens David Rothenberg’s new
book Bug Music, which explores this overlap between
natural and synthetic, insect and human-made sound.

“If you like electronic music, you will like insect
sounds,” says Rothenberg. “Bug music is electronic music,
there is a deep, important connection here. People have loved
insect sounds for many thousands of years. Prehistoric people, and
Neanderthals, would probably have loved analogue synthesizers.”

Rothenberg himself is rhapsodic about insect sounds
and, as with his previous investigations of bird and whale song, he
set out to perform alongside a range of insect musicians: “the
snowy tree cricket is one of the simplest and most beautiful… the
cicadas among the most intense and gripping, while the treehoppers’
vibrational taps are among the most astonishingly complex.” All
these collaborations can be heard on the Bug Music
companion CD.

Bug Music encompasses an incredible breadth
of scale, from the great – the mysterious 17-year incubation cycle
of the Magicicada, a
monstrous brood of which will hatch in New York State early this
summer – to the very, very small – the molecular sounds recorded
inside the brains of mosquitos at Clarkson University in
New York. “I want readers and listeners to consider rhythm and
noise at all possible scales of human awareness,” says Rothenberg,
“from the microscopic to the macrocosmic.

"That's why I found Curtis Roads' granular synthesis
so compelling – the granular dimension of time is the secret of bug
music. Dividing sounds into tiny 'grains' can have huge
implications for the re-conceiving of all human thought and our
place in the universe… when I mentioned that to Roads he said,
‘don't get too carried away!’”

Rothenberg encourages readers to open up to an
expanded sense of what music can be, and from this he hopes we
might encounter an expanded sense of our surroundings. The implicit
message is that retuning oneself to think differently about music
might be beneficial on multiple levels: to each of us individually,
to humankind as a species and, perhaps, even to the planet as a
whole.

“Listening to nature can be a gateway towards
listening to experimental music, but listening to and enjoying
experimental music can also be a gateway towards listening to the
sounds of nature.”

Humankind’s ability to empathise with and understand
the needs of other species is one of our greatest talents, and
listening to them is just one part of that. “We know so little
about the sensory world of other creatures,” says Rothenberg,
“nature is still a giant book waiting to be opened, translated, and
deciphered; or, if you see it as music, it can be listened to and
interacted with.”

Bug Music: How Insects Gave us Rhythm and
Noise is published by St Martin’s
Press. More details on the book here, and on the CD here.